Gaming Zone?

texchanchan writes "The BBC reports on a study by Dr. Costas Karageorghis, Brunel University (London): 'Recent research has suggested that it could be possible for a person immersed in a computer game to achieve the same level of meditative concentration' usually found in religious contemplatives and athletes in 'The Zone.' The article also quotes Dr. Karageorghis as saying 'It's a deeply pleasurable experience and it's something that's not very often experienced by people, rather it's something that often represents people's peak experiences in a particular area.'"

Comments

forgetting it's a game

[bskin]

My experience with this is that it can apply to lots of different areas. I think the key is that you're working within a special set of rules, and at some point, you forget what you're actually doing. Normally you still know you're just sitting in a chair playing a game, or coding a program, or maybe throwing around a football. But at some point you just forget all that, and it's like in your mind, the rules of the game are the 'rules' of the real world. To you, there's nothing going on outside of what you're doing. Thinking about it that way, I see no reason it couldn't apply to anything that requires heavy concentration and operates on a set of rules that's different from those of every day life. I think most of us have experienced it in different contexts.

I think it's interesting that this is a phenomenon that a lot of us have discovered on our own, but they're just starting to understand why it happens. I'd like to see more research on this subject in other contexts.

--b.